While ripping lossless (to FLAC or some other codec) is always advised there are times when we need lossy music files.

One example is for portable players. Lossless files take up a LOT of space, so it's more efficient to play OGGs or MP3s or whatever.

In other cases, some music players simply don't work with certain codecs. iTunes doesn't play FLAC out-of-the-box, for instance.

This idea would add a rule to maintain multiple mirrors of your music library. Your current music library becomes the source. You then declare multiple extra libraries, with the desired music file format in each one. For instance, you may say you want an MP3 version of your FLAC library. bliss would then transcode each file into the new format in the new library.

While ripping lossless (to FLAC or some other codec) is always advised there are times when we need lossy music files.

One example is for portable players. Lossless files take up a LOT of space, so it's more efficient to play OGGs or MP3s or whatever.

In other cases, some music players simply don't work with certain codecs. iTunes doesn't play FLAC out-of-the-box, for instance.

This idea would add a rule to maintain multiple mirrors of your music library. Your current music library becomes the source. You then declare multiple extra libraries, with the desired music file format in each…

Adding an option to clean the tags :
- Auto clean the spaces at the beginning and the end of a tag
- Identify tags with uf-8/Iso errors like &nbsp; instead of spaces or &amp; instead of &, etc... and fix these.

Allow automatic population of the "Album Artist" field when the "Artist" field for an album is consistent throughout all tracks. Suggest options for "Album Artist" when the "Album" field is 90% consistent i.e. when some tracks include "Ft Joe Bloggs"

Some albums just cannot be fixed because, for instance, their album art cannot be found anywhere. For the sake of achieving 100% compliance I'd like to mark these albums as 'ignored'. I want to be able to do it for any aspect of bliss, for instance file organisation (saying 'actually, the existing location is ok') or genre etc.

Having Bliss back to work where it left off when restarting would be very useful especially for NAS devices with scheduled start / stop package.
(allows you to run Bliss only at night to save memory/cpu when you use the NAS at day)

I am generally choosing Album Art at 500x500. I can obviously use min/max to reduce the number of options, but it would be an ideal alternative if I could also select "Preferred Size" and have Bliss choose album art which matches or is close - Max/Min size would still be useful to give to give Bliss a certain amount of leeway (or even better, you could choose to accept any art within say, 10% of this size).

With a look-up table, one could convert, for example, genres such as OBC, Broadway, Musicals, Original Cast, Cast Album and so forth all to the same, uniform genre (in this case, I might prefer to have them all tagged as Original Cast). This could also be used to reduce the number of genres. Yes, it reduces specificity but it might be nice to have all jazz listed as jazz, instead of "stride piano," "ragtime" "dixieland" "trad jazz" "modern jazz" "contemporary jazz" and so forth.

do a dry run especially for the freeware;
seeing the amount of "fixes" suddenly go down on my live library was terribly frightening.
I really need to know what will be changed where, my library is too large to let random software do something on it.

An admin user and password account is a must. Authorisation should be delivered via HTTP basic authentication at least.

Later (but this is not the subject of this idea), further accounts with read only and/or write access would be great. Access control could allow read/write access to certain things such as certain albums, artists etc. Some accounts would be able to reorganise certain things. This would be especially useful if future API functions are made available.

Bliss seems to remember that an album existed after it has been deleted - and therefore keep looking to determine whether it is compliant or not, even though there is no album to check.

It would be better if Bliss flagged that an album appeared to have vanished (you might want to know if this was by mistake!) but then gave you the option to acknowledge the change so that Bliss "forgets" the album and no longer looks for it.

Probably not spotted before because you don't often delete albums/music - but this happened during some testing of VortexBox/Bliss when I was just using some sample albums to check functionality - and then changed the albums I was using.

Bliss seems to remember that an album existed after it has been deleted - and therefore keep looking to determine whether it is compliant or not, even though there is no album to check.

It would be better if Bliss flagged that an album appeared to have vanished (you might want to know if this was by mistake!) but then gave you the option to acknowledge the change so that Bliss "forgets" the album and no longer looks for it.

Probably not spotted before because you don't often delete albums/music - but this happened during some testing of VortexBox/Bliss when…

In order to be best compatible with different systems (Windows, Mac, Linux) or different file systems, it would be nice if bliss would be able to use a limited character set for naming directories and files.

Syncing different systems if e.g. file names contain umlauts like "Die Ärzte" sometimes causes problems, because the files are not considered to be the same by the synchronization software.

Different systems also have different file name restrictions, e.g. Windows does not allow colons, while Linux does. On the Mac, colons in file names are somehow treated as forward slashes.

I would really like bliss to handle all the naming of files and directories from the tags, but only if bliss can be told to perform an umlaut replacement (e.g. remove all diacritical marks and remove or replace all special characters).

Thanks
Carsten

In order to be best compatible with different systems (Windows, Mac, Linux) or different file systems, it would be nice if bliss would be able to use a limited character set for naming directories and files.

Syncing different systems if e.g. file names contain umlauts like "Die Ärzte" sometimes causes problems, because the files are not considered to be the same by the synchronization software.

Different systems also have different file name restrictions, e.g. Windows does not allow colons, while Linux does. On the Mac, colons in file names are somehow treated as forward slashes.

When a file is taged with just the words 'Album' / 'Artist' or just rubbish, try and identify the tag details from the folder or path name. Also give an option to see the path on the Album (or Artist) page so you can copy and paste the details into the right place from the path manually

When files are moved by file reorganisation, there are many empty folders everywhere. it become difficult to find which contains files or not.
maybe a folder whose every file have been moved could be deleted (and parent folder if nothing left in) ...

One way or another in large collections there always seems to be a few corrupt files. Existing programs to check music file integrity don't work well on large collections and it would be great if this was an integral part of Bliss.